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Most adults eat enough protein to avoid a deficiency, and not enough for anything they actually want. Seven questions, twenty seconds, and you’ll know your number.
Your details
Where you are now
your target is 170 g a day
Your gap: 75 g a day
Your first step: not the whole jump
Pick any one of these. That’s the whole step.
Take it with you
The step above is one meal. The Protein Sources Guide is a printable two-page reference: what a real protein serving actually looks like across meat, fish, dairy, eggs and plants, the per-meal number to anchor to, and what to reach for when you’re short at the end of the day. Free, and yours to print.
There is no single protein number, because “enough” and “optimal” answer two different questions. The RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram is a floor: it was set to keep sedentary adults from becoming deficient, not to support training, ageing, or fat loss. This tool starts above that floor and adjusts from there.
Multiplying straight bodyweight breaks at the edges: it under-shoots very lean people and produces absurd numbers for anyone carrying a lot of fat, because fat tissue doesn’t drive protein needs. So if your weight is more than about 20% above a mid-range weight for your height, the calculation blends the two, a standard clinical convention, rather than using your scale weight flat. Your reference weight is shown with your result.
For people training with calories at maintenance, a meta-analysis of 49 studies found gains in fat-free mass flattening out around 1.6 g/kg per day, with a confidence interval reaching up to about 2.2, which is why this tool gives a range instead of pretending 1.6 is a precise threshold (Morton et al., 2018).
In a calorie deficit, protein needs go up, not down. A systematic review of resistance-trained athletes losing weight landed on roughly 1.8–2.7 g/kg of bodyweight, with the leaner and steeper cases at the top of that band (Helms et al., 2014). Above about 2.4–2.7 g/kg the muscle-sparing benefit stops accruing.
From 60 onward the floor rises. Older muscle responds less strongly to the same dose of protein, so both ends of the range are nudged up.
The “where you are now” figure comes from a single question about your meals. It’s an estimate to show you the shape of the gap, not a food log: if you track, use your real number instead.
Food values are from USDA FoodData Central, rounded to realistic household servings. Expect them to vary by roughly 10% with cut, cooking method, and brand.
Needs are different during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and this tool doesn’t cover them. Neither does it cover children or teenagers.
Nothing here is medical advice or a diagnosis. If you have kidney disease, your doctor’s guidance beats a calculator: higher protein hasn’t been shown to harm healthy kidneys, but reduced kidney function changes the answer entirely.
Protein isn’t a moral test, and more isn’t automatically better. It’s just the one number most people have quietly set to “not deficient” when they meant to set it to what they actually want.
When you’ve got your number, pick the next small step.